Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
AGNOSTIC MEAT-EATING
How about agnostic meat-eaters? In the context of a philosophical debate, their
kind of objection sounds lethal: no philosopher wants to sound as if her fundamental
premises descended on her through divine inspiration and that their truth is secured
by the aura with which they are endowed. Philosophers are in the business of justi-
fication, and so a demand for argumentative support is never inappropriate. On the
other hand, how does one
argue
that, for example, pain is bad or that it harms the
sufferer, or that if an entity can be made to suffer, then things matter to it? Frey, for
example, denies that suffering is a sufficient condition for ascribing interests to an en-
tity on the grounds that no one has given an argument showing that this is so. Now
it may seem as clear as day that if an entity is in great pain, then it desperately
wants to avoid this state. Things obviously
matter
to this entity, and in this sense, it
has an
interest
in the termination of the pain. Frey does not deny the vivacity of this
belief. He simply wants an argument for it.
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The agnostic meat-eater is in effect unfairly forcing his opponent into an area that
is an embarrassing one for all moral philosophy. The dubiousness of the move con-
sists of invoking general moral skepticism and dressing it up as a form of skepticism
that is particular to animals, when in fact it is destructive to any argument within ap-
plied ethics. Under the guise of requiring argument in the limited context of the ve-
getarian debate, the agnostic meat-eater is demanding vegetarians to solve nothing less
than the problem of basic beliefs in moral philosophy. The difficulty that the agnostic
meat-eater taps is a sore spot for ethicists, relating to the argumentative weakness and
fragility of moral reasoning in general. Take, for example, the belief that without
some weighty justification, inflicting suffering is wrong. This judgment is “basic” in
the sense that it is constitutive of the notion of wrong: if someone denies such a
judgment, he or she either altogether lacks the concept of wrong or is proposing
some radical reform in ethics. But what is one to say if an argument in support of
this judgment is required?
The position I find most plausible with regard to basic beliefs is sociological rather
than argumentative: we are not
argued
into accepting the association between, say,
unjustified inflicted suffering and wrong but are socialized into it. We wish to avoid
suffering ourselves. This affects our dealings with others, making us aware of what
they wish to avoid or what they perceive as harm. Philosophers typically do not ob-
ject to such a developmental account and to its systematization by a theory of moral
development of one type or another. But since someone can be socialized into
Nazism too, philosophers would typically seek to avoid conflating the descriptive and
the normative accounts of moral development. Philosophers will ask for argumentative
backing for such ground-level preferences. Yet do we really have
arguments
why in-
